Novelist, radical Susan Sontag, 71, dies in New York

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From combined dispatches

Susan Sontag, a critic, novelist and essayist who blamed America for the September 11 terror attacks and once declared that "the white race is the cancer of human history," died in New York yesterday at age 71.

Mrs. Sontag died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. The hospital did not release the cause of death, although Mrs. Sontag was first treated for breast cancer in the 1970s.

Mrs. Sontag was 31 when her essay "Notes on 'Camp'" established her as a prominent critic. Her essays on art, culture and politics were published in influential journals, including the New York Review of Books.

"The white race is the cancer of human history," she wrote in a 1967 essay in Partisan Review. "It is the white race and it alone -- its ideologies and inventions -- which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."

Such comments led novelist Tom Wolfe to dismiss Mrs. Sontag as "just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review."

An outspoken admirer of communist revolutionaries, including Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh and Cuba's Fidel Castro, Mrs. Sontag was a fierce opponent of U.S. foreign policy. She angered many Americans in 2001 when, less than two weeks after the terrorist hijackings of September 11, she wrote an article that suggested the United States deserved to be attacked.

"Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world,'" Mrs. Sontag wrote, "but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?"

She added: "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of [the September 11] slaughter, they were not cowards."

In 2000, Mrs. Sontag won the National Book Award for the historical novel "In America."